How did WW2 affect Young People, Jews and other persecuted groups?

Question 1

What was the ‘Swing’ movement?

Answer 1

• Made up of middle-class teenagers
• Went to parties and listened to English and American music and sang English songs
• Danced American dances such as the ‘jitterbug’ to banned jazz music
• Accepted Jews at their clubs and talked about and enjoyed sex
• Deliberately ‘slovenly’
• Nazis issued a handbook helping the authorities to identify these degenerate types

Question 2

Who were the Edelweiss Pirates?

Answer 2

• Working-class teenagers
• Also known as ‘The Roving Dudes’
• Fourteen and seventeen year olds
• Sang songs, just like the Hitler Youth, but changed the lyrics to mock Germany
• Taunted and sometimes attacked members of the Hitler Youth

Question 3

Did the Pirates’ activities concern the Nazis?

Answer 3

• Yes, they caused serious worries to the Nazi authorities in some cities
• In December 1942 the Gestapo broke up 28 groups containing 739 adolescents
• Nazis needed future workers and future soldiers, so they couldn’t simply exterminate all these teenagers and place them in concentration camps
• They were uncertain with how to respond
• Sometimes the Nazis arrested them, or ignored them

Question 4

How did the Pirates act in Cologne, 1944?

Answer 4

• In Cologne in 1944 Pirate activities escalated
• They helped to shelter army deserters and escaped prisoners
• Stole armaments and took part in an attack on the Gestapo during which its chief was killed
• Nazis responded by rounding up the so called ‘ringleaders’
• Twelve were publicly hanged in November 1944

Question 5

What were Polish ghettos?

Answer 5

• After invading Poland in 1939, the Nazis set about ‘Germanising’ western Poland
• They transported Poles from their homes and replaced them with German settlers
• 1 in 5 Poles died, either in the fighting or as a result of racial policies in the period 1939-45
• Polish Jews were rounded up and transported to the big cities into sealed areas, ghettos
• Able-bodied Jews were used for slave labour

Question 6

Mass murder committed by German forces controlled by the Nazis

Answer 6

• In 1941, Germany invaded the USSR
• Within weeks the Nazis were in control of 3 million Soviet Jews
• German forces rounded up and shot Communist Party activists and their Jewish supporters
• Executions carried out by special SS units called Einsatzgruppen
• Mass shooting were taken place all over occupied eastern Europe by the autumn of 1941